El pasado en la novela española actual: el tema de la Guerra Civil

In Spain, a great number of novels about our most recent past, specifi cally
on the Spanish Civil War, have been published in the last years. This paper
aims to off er an explanation for the proliferation of such a large number of
titles on the Spanish Civil War. The paper fi rst presents a research hypothesis,
analysing this return to the past such that in contemporary Spanish narrative
the past appears as if it were a product of advanced capitalism: once authors
have accepted and internalized the premise, as suggested by the post-modern
mantra of the “end of history”, that we live in the best of possible worlds and
that there is no opposition or contradiction in our present, the novelist must
seek recourse in the confl ictual past in order to be able to evoke narrative
complexity. The paper also attempts to defi ne a paradigm that shows the
aesthetic and ideological mechanisms used in the reconstruction of the war
which these novels propose. The following techniques – the equidistant and
symmetrical description of the national war, its “aideological” image of reality,
its questioning of the objectivist paradigms and the ontological balance
established between History and fi ction – are some of the features by which
it is possible to characterise this literary trend of the Spanish Civil War today,
in line with the dominant postmodern ideology.